When Amazon released its contact center service, Amazon Connect, it was met with skepticism by some industry insiders because it didn’t have the features other solutions offer. After working with the cloud-based contact center service for a little over a year, we’ve seen firsthand the power of Amazon Connect in its simplicity. It’s not that... Read More

Does Your IVR Really Save You Money? As the original self-service tool, IVR technology has long been a cost savings mechanism. Unfortunately, many organizations today don’t realize that their antiquated IVR solution is actually driving up contact center costs because the options are so limited and the containment rate is so low. So, what can... Read More

Let’s face it, there are other technologies in the contact center that are more exciting than your IVR. But despite the rise of other communication channels, telephony remains “by far the largest inbound interaction channel,” according to ContactBabel. That being the case, it’s worth asking, “Is it time to upgrade the IVR?” Here are five... Read More

In the last post, I talked about the Big Buckets. One bucket holds transactional (self-service) events. One contains interactional (live-agent) events. And the third is home to the hybrids: events that are both transactional and interactional. That third bucket—let’s call it the blended bucket—could soon be the biggest bucket as more and more companies adopt... Read More

The First Step in Planning Your Self-Service Investment Planning your self-service investments means making decisions across multiple disciplines. USAN, in association with ContactBabel, has just published a nearly 200-page report on that topic—50 charts deep, covering all the critical topics that make up today’s self-service investment strategy. Those topics include transitioning to self-service, evaluating ROI,... Read More

It’s December now. Snow, in some places, is falling. Soon, holiday lights will be flickering and thoughts of what the new year will bring will occupy us. And we know what that means. That’s right. It will be time to read all the articles about IVR and contact center and customer service trends for 2017.... Read More

How to Show Customers Respect: The Generation X Edition Every customer wants respect and, of course, you want to give them that respect. The question is: How? What’s perceived as respectful by one generation may be perceived as an inconvenience by another. We’ve previously taken a look at how the values of Millennials... Read More

When it comes to customer service, every generation wants to be shown respect. Obvious? Yes. Easy? No. Respect means different things to different people. In order to show proper respect to your customers, you need to understand who they are and what they value. Here are five tips for showing Millennials respect that... Read More

Regardless of who they are, everyone wants respect. That’s especially true when it comes to engaging with customer service. It’s also true that everyone perceives respect differently. While your customer service agents might mean well, their interactions with customers might not be coming through as intended. Here are five tips for showing respect to Baby... Read More

I talk a lot about personalization. About how you can study how each caller into your IVR behaves over time, and about how to adjust the automated interaction to support and react based on that data. Of course, in order to analyze the behavior pattern of a caller, there has to be enough behavior to... Read More

In the past couple of posts I’ve talked about the importance of not allowing your IVR to stand in the way when your caller zeros out to reach an agent. But you face another issue that stands between call handoff and customer satisfaction: the wait. Here’s where your IVR comes back into play. Even though... Read More

There are lots of great suggestions about how to keep customers from zeroing out. But sometimes zeroing out is exactly what you want them to do. When? Whenever they want. If your customer wants to talk to an agent, make it happen. If he hits zero, send him on to a live agent, no questions... Read More

We talk a lot about IVR containment. Containment is a good thing. The fewer people that zero out the better your return on your IVR investment. But there’s one time where containment is not a good thing. When the caller doesn’t want to be contained.Your business success doesn’t depend upon how well you keep customers... Read More

Your customer orders a shirt from your mobile app. She receives the wrong size. Now what? How does your omnichannel system respond? To answer that, I’m going to coin a couple of terms here—“results-aware omnichannel” and “interaction-aware omnichannel.” Spotlighting the difference between the two brings out the true potential of an omnichannel, and the unique... Read More

A Software-Based Omnichannel As a technology matures, even in the early stages of that maturity, it gets smarter, smaller, streamlined. It also heads over to the software side of things. Software solutions—instead of software built to run on a hardware solution—are more versatile, easier to grow and evolve, easier to adapt, and a longer-value investment.... Read More

Often, when moving to a new technology model—such as the omnichannel—a conflict can appear between IT and Business Process Management. We’re involved right now in a significant omnichannel initiative that’s found the right balance between the two. We share some of that story here. Read More

USAN's Director of Product Development Michael Gregorio joins other industry experts in this Contact Center Pipeline article discussing the top challenges that contact centers face when transitioning to an omnichannel strategy. Read More

You’re lagging behind in omnichannel adoption: you and most other companies too. That’s bad news, but it’s good news too. There’s still time to catch up before you find yourselves in an omni-channel panic. Read More

The USAN-sponsored ICMI study clearly exposes what USAN considers one of the biggest threats today to companies who are slow delivering support and service through an omnichannel. Learn about it here. Read More